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Scott McLaren The Evolution of Joss Whedon’s Vampire Mythology and the Ontology of the Soul (1) While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore for the purposes of their narratives, Joss Whedon has shown a remarkably consistent reluctance to follow a similar course in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.[1] Some critics have suggested, however, that Whedon’s particular use and adaptation of vampire folklore results in an irreconcilable contradiction between two distinct but simultaneously held concepts of the soul (see Abbott “Walking the Fine Line” 2-4; Wilcox 15). On the one hand, Whedon, a self-described existentialist with Sartrean leanings (Whedon, “Commentary for ‘Objects in Space’”), advances an understanding of the soul as a metaphor for individual moral agency; on the other he fosters a more traditional concept of the soul as the reified and ontological seat of individual identity and conscience. This latter trope, heavily influenced by religious and folkloric antecedents, forms a psychological framework from which entire season arcs depend and leads to a more serious problem that has been frequently commented upon in the literature (see for example DeKelb-Rittenhouse 148 and Sakal 242-243): specifically, how is it possible for one to hold the ensouled Angel (and later the ensouled Spike) reasonably accountable for their crimes as vampires when prima facie such creatures, according to the Whedonverse vampire mythology, are beings without souls, without consciences, possessed by demons, and who moreover retain no connection with the absent soul of the host body’s former identity?[2] (2) Whedon might have solved this problem quite simply by minimizing the ontological mythology of the soul set forth in the earliest seasons of BtVS with an alternate existential elaboration of the soul strictly as a metaphor for election between good and evil actions. This way a tacit connection between the identity of the “possessed” human and the “demon” vampire—and a marrying of their wills— would have been more readily credible as a context in which Angel might meaningfully seek redemption for Angelus’ past crimes. After all, Whedon does just this with the crucifix and other sacramental apotropaics—quietly deemphasizing their importance over the life of the two series without making any overt statement concerning their de facto diminishing efficacy.[3] That he did not follow this course when evolving his vampire mythology and the concept of the human soul over the course of the series suggests that he saw some value in maintaining the tension between the ontological and the existential. At the same time, Whedon has also been widely praised for presenting a fictive universe where moral ambiguity is wrestled with in an authentically nuanced environment tinged with “grey.” As this paper will argue, the ongoing tension between the ontological and the existential—the soul reified and the soul as metaphor for moral choice—that Whedon consistently maintains throughout the whole of BtVS and its spin-off Angel, far from detracting from the verisimilitude of the series, contributes to the much vaunted and provocative ambiguity that has been one of the Whedonverse’s most commented upon and defining features. (3) In order to understand how Whedon, an atheist and an existentialist, might have arrived at an ontological mythology of the soul in the first place, it will be helpful to consider very briefly the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the traditional (and still popular) understanding of the soul in the West as well as the manner in which such doctrines affected the subsequent development of vampire folklore in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. The way in which Whedon adopted and adapted that folklore initially, and how he evolved that mythology over the life-span of the series, will also be considered by making a careful comparison of the way Whedon variously permitted both ontological and existential emphases in the first season of BtVS, where the mythology is initially established, and the final season of Angel, where it reaches its final expression among a cast that includes two ensouled vampires as well as a third soulless demon who gives many evidences of having integrated herself into a social and moral environment conditioned largely by human values. Throughout it will be observed that Whedon and his writers allow the viewer’s understanding to swing like a pendulum between the ontological and existential views of the soul without ever wholly discounting either. (4) The concept of the soul finds its most primitive written roots in religious and mythopoeic texts such as the Sanskrit Rig Veda, the Sumerian Descent of Inanna into Hell and Homer’s Iliad. The earliest Greek philosophers understood the soul to be a cosmological agent by which all things, including the sun and moon, moved (see Green and Groff 17ff; see also Aristotle 403b). It wasn’t until Aristotle, however, that a clear and systematic elaboration of this doctrine emerged in a single work with respect to human beings. In his much-studied treatise On the Soul, Aristotle extends the notions of his philosophical predecessors by arguing that the individual human soul lends the body its capacity for life by serving as its animating force. Among a number of metaphors to illustrate this point Aristotle suggests that the body is to the physical eye as the soul is to the eye’s ability to see. In this way Aristotle understood the human soul to be inseparable from the body: a body without a soul isn’t an active body (Greek soma) at all but merely a lifeless corpse (Greek nekros).[4] Similarly, the soul without the body is as unthinkable a proposition as vision is without an eye. Though not understood as the seat of individual personality, the soul for Aristotle is the body’s indispensable animating force without which the it cannot live or move. (5) For the doctrine common among today’s major monotheistic faiths that the soul is an immortal spirit inhabiting the body and lending it intelligence, will, and personality, one must turn to the discursive but influential writings of Plato. In addition to functioning as the body’s animating life force, the soul is, as Plato described it, in command of the body (Georgias 493a), the seat of all knowledge (Meno 86a), and an immortal spirit separate from the body (Meno 86b). By locating within the soul both the life-force of the body and human knowledge, Plato is the first to set forth a doctrine that allows for personal immortality in a separable soul with memories intact. This marks an enormous and important distinction from both Aristotle’s assertion that a soul without a body is unthinkable and Homer’s depiction of souls as imbecilic shadows divorced from their previous lives and memories (see Green and Groff 50ff; Iliad XXIII). Plato’s thought was adopted and adapted by some of the earliest Christian apologists and had enormous influence on the subsequent development of the Christian doctrine of the human soul, primarily through the writings of St. Augustine (MacDonald 143ff.). From there the concept of the soul as an immortal spirit animating the body as the seat of human will, intelligence, and conscience, has pervaded every corner of Western philosophy and culture.[5] (6) In many instances vampire folklore, albeit often unconsciously and haphazardly, is an extension of these philosophies and doctrines. Because the soul is identified so consistently in Western philosophy with the capacity for agency, it is not surprising that some of the earliest vampire folklore recounts revenants who are not soulless bodies but bodiless souls—that is, ghosts—who return from the dead to torment their victims.[6] The practice of exhuming bodies in Serbia and Walachia in what are sometimes referred to as the eighteenth century’s European “vampire epidemics” (see Barber 5ff.; Senn 39), together with the advent of Enlightenment materialism, however, shifted the onus of blame away from the soul of the deceased and onto the corpse. Indeed, in some traditions the vampire corpse was believed to function entirely without a soul. George MacDonald, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, observes for example that “[. .] a vampire was a body retaining a kind of animal life after the soul had departed. If any relation existed between it and the vanished ghost, it was only sufficient to make it restless in its grave” (MacDonald, “Cruel Painter” 185). This, coupled with a folkloric belief in many cultures that one’s reflection is an image of one’s soul (see Barber 179), gave rise to the notion that vampires, because they lack souls, similarly lack reflections. Whedon follows this tradition in several ways by depriving his vampires both of reflections and of breath ("Out of Mind, Out of Sight," B1011; "Prophecy Girl," B1012; "Lovers Walk," B3008; "Ground State," A4020, etc.)—even and perhaps mistakenly in the case of the ensouled vampires Angel and later Spike. (7) Other branches of vampire folklore, however, are more generally compatible with the Aristotelian proposition that the soul represents both an indispensable capacity for agency and functions as the animating force behind the body’s movements. The word animation itself derives from the Latin anima. "soul," as well as denoting other functions attributed to it by the early Greek philosophers including life and breath. In this branch of vampire folklore there remained an acknowledged need to explain how vampire bodies could continue to function and move after death in the absence of a soul. A second soul, an animating principle that would lend the body a capacity for movement and agency, was therefore posited. This “second soul” might be either a second human soul, a returned soul, or a demon soul infused into the corpse by the Devil: It is extremely common, worldwide, for postmortem functioning to be explained as the action of a second “soul.” One soul departs at death, but another remains in the corpse, animating it for a time, until it too departs or simply dies.

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